A team of experts will fly to Qatar in the coming days to finalise a proposal put forward by the government of Cyprus to ship aid to Gaza by way of a ‘humanitarian sea corridor’ from the eastern Mediterranean island.
Following talks with Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha today, Cyprus’s president Nikos Christodoulides confirmed the experts would visit the Gulf state imminently. The leader told reporters:
We agreed that in the next few days a technical team from Cyprus, our team of experts who are working on the details of our proposal, will be here in order to proceed with the implementation of everything as described in the Republic of Cyprus’s proposal.
Under the initiative large quantities of aid will be dispatched to the besieged coastal strip on vessels loaded at the port of Larnaca. Israeli agents would inspect the shipments both at the Cypriot port and once they were transferred onto ships.
Christodoulides has said the plan could be activated as soon as conditions on the ground permit, with Cypriot experts fine-tuning arrangements since it was formally announced in early November. Larnaca lies a mere 210 nautical miles away from Gaza.
The shipments would supplement the trickle of aid getting into the enclave via lorries crossing through Egypt’s Rafah checkpoint with sources describing a single shipment as the equivalent of 500 trucks of aid.
Qatar, which has played a crucial role mediating the four-day truce in fighting that is set to expire Tuesday AM in the event that an extension is not reached, is now believed to be working on plans to kickstart the maritime aid corridor as soon as possible.
The EU’s most easterly member state, Cyprus has good relations with Israel and the Arab world. Christodoulides has said the initiative highlights the strategic island’s ability to be “a bridge to the region.”
The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, was asked on National Public Radio this morning about the prospects for an extension to the hostage arrangement, under which Hamas would release 10 more hostages for each extra day of ceasefire. This is what Kirby said.
We don’t know. We certainly hope that it can [be extended]... The onus is going to be on Hamas.. to be able to come up with those 10 hostages per day.
“We have been working this literally by the hour, and that will be no different today,” Kirby said.
Asked about Joe Biden’s personal involvement, Kirby said:
In the last three days, and of course throughout today, he’ll be personally involved. He engaged with the leaders yesterday, he spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Emir of Qatar, to make sure that we are moving forward as much as possible and to explore the idea of an extension on Hamas’s part and on Israel’s part. That was one of the prime focuses of his communications yesterday, so he personally engaged and I would fully expect him to stay personally engaged going forward.
